Please note: This blog is a reprint of an article that appeared on Huffington Post a few weeks ago.

How can we measure the resiliency of the Haitian people who are the poorest in the western hemisphere with 55% living below the extreme poverty line of $1 a day? On a good day in Haiti, nearly half the population doesn't know when or where the next meal will come; in good times, 47% don't have any access to the most basic health care; 45% of the population doesn't have clean water and 80% are without basic sanitation. People fear going to the nation's main hospital, which we have worked to bring to life over the last week, because at its best, it provided inadequate care in facilities with marginal electricity and water, and received no funding. When we arrived there, we found no basic medical supplies to restock the meager supplies we could fit into our bags and our small plane.

How can we measure the resiliency and capacity to endure of these people who have endured for 200 years? Perhaps it is in the strength of the 85-year-old woman found yesterday in the rubble 10 days after the quake still breathing, with a pulse and blood pressure and who after some intravenous fluids, started producing urine again. Or the little boy who a day after being found in the rubble after a week was running around our medical camp hugging the nurses and doctors who brought him back from near death? Or the 13-year-old who ran to the top of the 3-story building as it collapsed under her, riding it down to the ground suffering "only" a massive laceration to her thigh that her mother attempted to stitch without anesthesia with a needle and thread. There is barely a whimper from the hospital campus where we reduced fractures with only a little pain medication and where gaping, infected and necrotic wounds are re-bandaged daily without sedation. There is only the occasional wailing from a broken heart.

Please note: This blog is a reprint of an article that appeared on Huffington Post a few weeks ago.

It is nine days after the quake, and last night three gaunt Haitian medical students, their school destroyed, came up to me in the dark as I walked past the nursing school with 150 nurses still buried in the rubble, the smell of rotting flesh floating in the hot, heavy evening air. They have helped out for the last week at the hospital but had no food to eat and only a little water to drink. Their homes were destroyed and most of their families were dead. Yet they showed up to help. They came to me to ask if they could get a job, a way to feed themselves and what family they had left. But the hospital's personal system is not functioning yet. Our first priority has been saving lives.

I went to get them food; high-energy biscuits (dry cookies) that were dropped off by the World Food Program too feed 5000 people on the hospital campus for five days. The food has been dropped off, but is locked behind three doors and there is no clear distribution system yet. It took me two hours to get them food and then find some more food for the new group of surgeons, doctors and nurses that arrived from Children's Hospital in Boston for Partners in Health. The three medical students slept out on the ground, with home to go back to, and with food in their stomachs for the first time in a week.

Please note: This blog is a reprint of an article that appeared on Huffington Post a few weeks ago.

I slept through the aftershock this morning, a small 6.1 earthquake that has had no real impact because everything that could be destroyed was already destroyed. But the aftershocks that will ripple through the lives of the Haitian people will last for decades. They will for Mitch, who I met the first morning at the hospital grounds. He was laying in the back alley, unattended for four days except for a small bandage around his knee. He called out softly in English for me to stop, to help him. He had not eaten nor drank water since the quake and was still smiling at me. He lost his entire family -- a wife and three children -- and home. He was alone with no one to care for him, unlike some of the other patients who were tended to by their less-wounded family members, bringing what food and water they could.

I kneeled down and opened his dressing. A quart of foul pus spilled out from his knee, which was shattered and crushed. Pier, my wife, is an orthopedic surgeon. She came over and said he needed to be the next surgery case.